Rows of feathers increasing in size to the hard-splayed
Wine-gloss tips of his outer edges.
Suppose, before you could speak, you watched
The slow spread of his wing over and over,
The appearance of that invisible appendage,
The unfolding transformation of his body to the airborne.
And you followed his departure again and again,
Learning to distinguish the red microbe of his being
Far into the line of the horizon.
Then today you might be the only one able to see
The breast of a single red bloom
Five miles away across an open field.
The modification of your eye might have enabled you
To spot a red moth hanging on an oak branch
In the exact center of the Aurorean Forest.
And you could define for us, "hearing red in the air,"
As you predict the day pollen from the poppy
Will blow in from the valley.
Naturally you would picture your faith arranged
In filamented principles moving from pink
To crimson at the final quill. And the red tremble
Of your dream you might explain as the shimmer
Of his back lost over the sea at dawn.
Your sudden visions you might interpret as the uncreasing
Of heaven, the bones of the sky spread,
The conceptualized wing of the mind untangling.
Imagine the intensity of your revelation
The night the entire body of a star turns red
And you watch it as it rushes in flames
Across the black, down into the hills.
If your father was a redbird,
Then you would be obligated to try to understand
What it is you recognize in the sun
As you study it again this evening
Pulling itself and the sky in dark red
Over the edge of the earth.
Pattiann Rogers's poetry often features careful observations of nature and the connections between humans and the natural world. This poem is a fine example of how an observation of something in nature (in this case, a cardinal) can lead to a kind of meditation on the color red and how a bird's eye might perceive it.
The poem doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern as far as line structure goes. It is an unrhymed poem in six stanzas of varying length.
The first thing I notice about the poem is the "suppose-then," and "if-then" pattern. The first three stanzas present this "suppose-then" pattern, and then the final stanza repeats this with a "if-then" statement.
I also notice the use of "this evening" in the fourth line of the final stanza. I imagine the inspiration for the poem as possibly this: the poet watches a cardinal looking to the west at a beautiful, red sunset. This observation sets off a meditation on how the eye of a cardinal might perceive the color red in nature, having associated the color with that of its bright-red father.
The first three stanzas seem to progress both in time and space, following the bird from when it is in the nest to watching as it watched its father take flight, coming and going to and from the nest. The third stanza brings us to "today," and to the ability to spot red things, even from a great distance. It is also in this third stanza that we begin to enter territory unfamiliar to our way of perceiving things through our five senses. For not only can this bird spot a single red bloom from a great distance, it also, according to the poet, may be able to define "hearing red in the air."
We are now prepared for stanza four, where human and bird perception seems to mingle, where words from the realm of human concerns are combined with an animal who has evolved and adapted to succeed in its environment. Faith is described in shades of red; dreams and the mind are mingled with the shape, texture, and color of red feathers.
There is one more striking image in the fifth stanza that we are asked to imagine from the bird's perspective before the poet brings us back in stanza six to the image that, perhaps, inspired this poem--that of a cardinal looking into a red sunset.
I like the way this poem gets us as readers to consider a perspective that we might not ordinarily think of, and that while science may never reveal to us what goes through the mind of a cardinal, poetry can help us imagine it.
Mr. Rude
Suppose Your Father Was a Redbird
Suppose his body was the meticulous layering
Of graduated down which you studied early,
Rows of feathers increasing in size to the hard-splayed
Wine-gloss tips of his outer edges.
Suppose, before you could speak, you watched
The slow spread of his wing over and over,
The appearance of that invisible appendage,
The unfolding transformation of his body to the airborne.
And you followed his departure again and again,
Learning to distinguish the red microbe of his being
Far into the line of the horizon.
Then today you might be the only one able to see
The breast of a single red bloom
Five miles away across an open field.
The modification of your eye might have enabled you
To spot a red moth hanging on an oak branch
In the exact center of the Aurorean Forest.
And you could define for us, "hearing red in the air,"
As you predict the day pollen from the poppy
Will blow in from the valley.
Naturally you would picture your faith arranged
In filamented principles moving from pink
To crimson at the final quill. And the red tremble
Of your dream you might explain as the shimmer
Of his back lost over the sea at dawn.
Your sudden visions you might interpret as the uncreasing
Of heaven, the bones of the sky spread,
The conceptualized wing of the mind untangling.
Imagine the intensity of your revelation
The night the entire body of a star turns red
And you watch it as it rushes in flames
Across the black, down into the hills.
If your father was a redbird,
Then you would be obligated to try to understand
What it is you recognize in the sun
As you study it again this evening
Pulling itself and the sky in dark red
Over the edge of the earth.
Pattiann Rogers's poetry often features careful observations of nature and the connections between humans and the natural world. This poem is a fine example of how an observation of something in nature (in this case, a cardinal) can lead to a kind of meditation on the color red and how a bird's eye might perceive it.
The poem doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern as far as line structure goes. It is an unrhymed poem in six stanzas of varying length.
The first thing I notice about the poem is the "suppose-then," and "if-then" pattern. The first three stanzas present this "suppose-then" pattern, and then the final stanza repeats this with a "if-then" statement.
I also notice the use of "this evening" in the fourth line of the final stanza. I imagine the inspiration for the poem as possibly this: the poet watches a cardinal looking to the west at a beautiful, red sunset. This observation sets off a meditation on how the eye of a cardinal might perceive the color red in nature, having associated the color with that of its bright-red father.
The first three stanzas seem to progress both in time and space, following the bird from when it is in the nest to watching as it watched its father take flight, coming and going to and from the nest. The third stanza brings us to "today," and to the ability to spot red things, even from a great distance. It is also in this third stanza that we begin to enter territory unfamiliar to our way of perceiving things through our five senses. For not only can this bird spot a single red bloom from a great distance, it also, according to the poet, may be able to define "hearing red in the air."
We are now prepared for stanza four, where human and bird perception seems to mingle, where words from the realm of human concerns are combined with an animal who has evolved and adapted to succeed in its environment. Faith is described in shades of red; dreams and the mind are mingled with the shape, texture, and color of red feathers.
There is one more striking image in the fifth stanza that we are asked to imagine from the bird's perspective before the poet brings us back in stanza six to the image that, perhaps, inspired this poem--that of a cardinal looking into a red sunset.
I like the way this poem gets us as readers to consider a perspective that we might not ordinarily think of, and that while science may never reveal to us what goes through the mind of a cardinal, poetry can help us imagine it.